Well it’s another Monday and that means it’s time for another entry in my spinoff of the popular Facebook feature I’ve been doing every Monday morning for Jensen’s Resorts and Marina on Captiva Island.

Monday “You Should Be On Captiva, Photo of the Week.” A royal tern majestically takes flight from an elevated dock as a boat full of anglers startle it along the shore of North Captiva Island recently.

This is a photo I took one morning while out fishing with a couple of good friends along the eastern shore of North Captiva Island. My buddies and I were fishing the docks that line the shore for redfish that particular day. There are numerous docks that line the shore of the island along Pine Island Sound.

The fishing along these docks is usually pretty good. However, on this particular day, it was slow and I mean slow. After a long morning of successful snook fishing at another part of the island, I had pretty much had enough.

The docks we were fishing were loaded with gulls and terns. There were hundred of birds and they were everywhere. I decided after hours and hours of casting a line, the fishing was for the birds and it was time to put down my rod and pick up my camera.

Over the years I’ve probably photographed thousands of birds. They’ve fascinated me from my earliest days of photography. However, the tern is a species I had never actually taken a really good photo of before.

As our boat eased along the docks and my companions continued to plop baits in the water, the terns would get nervous and were easily startled.

When the boat would get to close to their perches, they would take flight and move onto another dock. Some would circle back around and return to the same dock. It made for a great opportunity to take photos of them in flight.

I was ecstatic with the result of my “tern in flight” photo. I remember thinking to myself, “well the fishing my be slow, but this pic is certainly a keeper.”

About This Blog

Ledger Staff Photographer Michael Wilson has been been an avid fisherman since the age of seven. His first freshwater fish was a carp caught on a dough ball when he still lived up North. His first saltwater fish was a mutton snapper caught from the old drawbridge at Islamorada in the Keys around the age of nine. He loves to combine fishing and photography and feels very lucky to have the opportunity to do so.

He is known in numerous internet forum fishing communities as SnookMook. Most people just call him Mookie. It’s a long story. It has something to do with baseball and the New York Mets. He’d rather tell ya a tall fish tale.

If you really want to know how he got the nickname Mookie, or want to add pounds and inches to a fishing report, e-mail him at snookmook1@aol.com